Here are the winners of the first beauty contest judged by AI

The robots made some unusual choices in the first international beauty contest judged by AI.

Beauty.AI 2.0 evaluated more than 6,000 user-submitted selfies using algorithms evaluating youthfulness, skin quality, symmetry, and appearance relative to databases of models and actors. Winners were broken down by age and gender.

Here are the top five women, ages 18–29:

beauty.ai

Apparently, these choices were controversial. Beauty.ai says a lot of contestants wrote in to complain, with one person writing: "What is your 'robot' worth??? One walk through a shopping-mall and I will discover more attractive people vs. that ones 'won' your Beauty Contest."

Beauty.ai chief science officer Alex Zhavoronkov defended the results on a call: "I wouldn't agree with some of the robot judges, but in general it turned out to be good."

One algorithm in the competition, AntiAgeist, evaluated youthfulness relative to real age, comparing actual age to a prediction of actual age and to a prediction of how humans would predict actual age. In the photos above, Lu Sophia got the best score as an 18-year-old who looks 13 to the robots.

MADIS compared entrants faces to faces in their demographic from databases of actors and models. One component compared them to an average of faces from that database: another compared them to distinctive traits of those beautiful people.

Finally, Symmetry Master looked at facial symmetry.

Beauty.ai is run by Youth Laboratories, a six-person company focused on developing technology to evaluate beauty and youthfulness. Currently, its main product is RYNKL, which can be downloaded as a separate app and has been licensed to some plastic surgery providers. The team is already building and outsourcing new algorithms to include in Beauty.ai 3.0, a contest it plans to hold later this year.